All-American
Conformity and Conscience in the CIA
He documented everything for his own protection. Some group was after him, he thought, and he wrote to the CIA and the FBI in the 1990s to ask them if they had a campaign against him. The FBI responded that “they were not investigating or harassing me and that I should direct my enquiries to another government agency,” he recounted. He was sure his house in Herndon, Virginia was bugged. He would shout that he was going to Kmart, only to go to another store to throw them off the trail. He stopped going to Kmart, McDonald’s, and 7/11 because of harassment he perceived to be going on there. He claimed the harassment stemmed from his 1993 publication of CIABASE, a database of CIA actions based on public sources. Everywhere he went, there seemed to be police cars, men with radios relaying coordinates, or store personnel harassing him. Unlike most people claiming CIA harassment, Ralph McGehee had worked for the Agency for 25 years. His paranoia may have originated earlier, in his attempts to get a book published on the CIA. Meeting with Bob, a supervisor whom he had known peripherally, to go over the Agency’s proposed redactions for the book, McGehee was shocked at the tone he set early on: “It’s too bad you didn’t work for the Israeli intelligence service,” Bob told him. “They know how to deal with people like you. They’d take you out and shoot you.”
Notre Dame 1948
“RALPH McGEHEE . . . this Chicago lad arrived in South Bend after a star-studded athletic career at Tilden High where he played football and featured in wrestling . . . the chunky tackle is enrolled in Commerce where he’s studying for a degree in business administration . . . history is his favorite course . . . pro ball might claim him after graduation . . .”
-The Notre Dame Scholastic, December 10, 1948
McGehee was an All-American player of the University of Notre Dame Fighting Irish football team during the 1940s, widely regarded as the greatest decade-long run in college football history. Under head coach Frank Leahy, Notre Dame compiled a record of 82-9-6 from 1940–49, never losing more than two games in a season and winning four national championships (1943, 1946, 1947, 1949), along with multiple unbeaten seasons. McGehee was part of the last three championships, including the 1949 team, which finished 10-0 and served as the pinnacle of this era, the final season for many players who had returned from World War II. “McGehee quietly put together a stellar football career,” Lou Somogyi wrote in a 2014 retrospective, “as a two-way starter on the undefeated 1948-49 units.”
Later on in his CIA career, McGehee would sometimes think back to his days playing football at Notre Dame: “Then I had been able to try my best, put my entire being into the game, feel the satisfaction of striving, working, and winning.” In his new job in intelligence, by contrast, “it was impossible to win. If you tried, you were beaten down by any one of many bureaucratic devices, and all you could do was swallow and pretend.”
Washington, DC 1952
“I look back to the individual that I was when I joined the Agency. I was a dedicated Cold Warrior, who felt the Agency was out there fighting for liberty, justice, democracy and religion around the world. And I believed wholeheartedly in this. I just felt proud every day that I went to work, because I was out at the vanguard of the battle against the international evil empire, international communist evil empire.”
-Ralph McGehee, 1987
More than one hundred newly processed young employees attended a training course in a building near the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, DC. During the orientation, an instructor “with a flourish” removed a cloth from a large organizational chart and revealed that the attendees would be working for the CIA. He explained that of the three main directorates, they would be assigned to the Directorate for Plans (DDP), responsible for gathering intelligence and conducting operations directed by the President and the National Security Council. McGehee imagined himself directing spies and playing a frontline role in the United States’ struggle against international communism. Although the instructor continued explaining the complex organizational details, most of the recruits paid little attention, assuming that practical experience would eventually teach them what they needed to know.
Jimmy Moe
In a heavily secured 10,000-acre compound, the young recruits received paramilitary training camp at Camp Peary, the CIA’s covert training facility in Virginia known internally as “the Farm.” Many of them were former college football players or military veterans, well-suited for “burn and bang” operations tied to Cold War missions in Korea, China, and Eastern Europe. “I have an unusual psychological profile for an ops officer,” McGehee later wrote. “CIA’s Psychological Assessment System rated me as having an extremely flexible mentality whereas most ops officers have a regulated; e.g., rigid mentality. Such rigidity does not favor analysis. I survived the selection process, in spite of my ‘F+’ rating because, in my opinion, I had played college football when the Agency was looking for ex-football players for its paramilitary programs.”
The three-month course immersed roughly thirty trainees in intensive physical conditioning and combat preparation. They were trained in parachuting, clandestine radio work, map reading, survival, explosives, small-unit tactics, escape and evasion, and silent killing. “Our instructor for this segment…taught the arcane skill of dirty fighting,” McGehee recalled, “how to kill, disable, or disarm an opponent with a knife, a wire, a silenced gun, or a variety of other devices.” The regimen was physically punishing and psychologically demanding, reinforcing discipline and a stark, black-and-white view of the world. Recruits lived under military-style conditions, rarely leaving the base due to security restrictions.
A central figure in McGehee’s memory was a classmate he calls “Jimmy Moe,” a Hungarian refugee and former Marine wounded at Iwo Jima. Physically powerful, aggressive, and untroubled by moral nuance, Jimmy embodied the qualities the CIA sought in paramilitary officers: stamina, fearlessness, technical skill with weapons and explosives, and unquestioning obedience. His exuberance after a few beers, shouting “Geronimo!” during parachute jumps, and his extreme intensity in training exercises made him both admired and unsettling to his peers.
The course culminated in a comprehensive field exercise involving simulated border crossings, jail escapes, reconnaissance, and mock attacks. By the end, the trainees were hardened and eager for assignment. While some, like Jimmy, were perfectly suited to the paramilitary mold, McGehee himself felt ambivalent, still drawn to the image of a traditional intelligence officer rather than a lifelong covert warrior.
McGehee felt excited to begin his overseas assignment as a CIA case officer in Taipei, Taiwan, following earlier assignments in Japan and the Philippines. His primary responsibility was liaison work with Chinese Nationalist intelligence services, helping to send agents into mainland China to gather intelligence on Communist developments. Other officers coordinated efforts to train and insert Nationalist teams into China to build resistance networks.
Among his colleagues was Jimmy Moe, his former paramilitary training classmate. Ill-suited to routine office work, Jimmy soon transferred to Southeast Asia to work with Thai forces and the Hmong in the early stages of the CIA’s secret war in Laos. The Hmong were recruited to fight against the communist Pathet Lao, a conflict that became a brutal proxy war. Jimmy integrated deeply into Hmong tribal society, marrying a chieftain’s daughter and earning the tribe’s loyalty through acts of bravery, such as carrying a wounded man for miles to safety. Regarded by the Hmong as nearly invincible, he also developed a reputation for aggressive combat reports. When a CIA officer in Vientiane questioned the accuracy of his battlefield claims, Jimmy dramatically responded by dumping a sack of human ears on the officer’s desk as proof of the enemies he had killed.
Years later, McGehee encountered Jimmy in Thailand and was struck by the dramatic change in him. Once the embodiment of aggressive confidence and stamina, Jimmy now appeared broken and defeated, sitting alone in the U.S. Embassy cafeteria in Bangkok. McGehee believed Jimmy had come to see himself as a “Judas goat,” having led the Hmong into devastating losses as the war decimated their young men and ultimately failed. The brief, silent exchange between the two men conveyed shared regret and unspoken recognition of the human cost of their covert operations. Rather than rekindling their friendship, they parted quietly: “To try to renew our friendship would be nothing but painful,” McGehee thought. “He turned away as I got up to leave.”
Taipei 1961
While working in Taiwan, McGehee found that CIA officers lived in a socially isolated environment. They resided in compounds, interacted mainly with one another and with Nationalist officials, and had little meaningful contact with ordinary Taiwanese people. Their lives were dominated by frequent parties, banquets, and social gatherings, which reinforced their detachment.
The Chief of Station in Taipei, Ray Cline, in McGehee’s view, was friendly and informal, treating employees of all ranks with equal courtesy. He had an unusual tradition of welcoming Agency wives by pinching their behinds as a sign of acceptance into the station’s social circle. “This was such a tradition that many women felt left out until he delivered his own version of social acceptance,” he claimed. “It was all in rather good fun and no one seemed to object.”
A detailed example of this lifestyle was the CIA’s March 1961 “hail and farewell” costume party. A group of CIA couples organized an “Indian tribe” theme, commissioning custom-made costumes from a local tailor at a cost equal to about a month’s wages for a Taiwanese worker. They called themselves the “Sit Tribe” and adopted names, with McGehee calling himself “Big Chief Bull Sit.” They held a separate gathering to create an elaborate feathered headdress; while it was “heavy and awkward” to wear, they were willing to do “anything for the cause.”
The party itself was extravagant, with abundant food, alcohol, and entertainment, and an atmosphere of indulgence. McGehee’s group won an award for best costume, and Cline presided over the event, jokingly introducing each member by their tribal name. The evening reflected the insular and privileged lifestyle of the CIA community. According to McGehee’s recollection, Cline handed “an award for the best female costume to the statuesque, beautiful wife of one of the case officers; her costume was a revealing bathing suit. After Ray gave her the award, she put her arms around him, turned his back to the audience and bestowed a most obvious pinch, to the delight of the crowd.”
Driving home from the party in costume while drinking champagne, McGehee passed poor Taiwanese neighborhoods and made eye contact with a young man living in a crude shack. This encounter highlighted for him the vast divide between the comfortable, insulated lives of the Americans and the poverty of the local population. Reflecting on this, McGehee questioned how the CIA could have understood Taiwan or produced accurate intelligence while remaining so disconnected from the people they were meant to observe and assist.
Bangkok 1967
A turning point in McGehee’s career came in 1967 while working on counterinsurgency surveys in Thailand. After being invited by his superiors and Thai officials to extend his tour and expand his successful survey program nationwide, McGehee enthusiastically accepted, believing his work was both effective and valued.
During a visit from William Colby, Chief of the Far East Division, McGehee presented detailed findings from his surveys, challenging the CIA’s prevailing view that Communist insurgents lacked popular support and relied mainly on coercion. Instead, he explained that Communist organizers patiently built grassroots support by integrating into villages, identifying grievances, recruiting locals, and gradually constructing a broad revolutionary infrastructure. He described how this process expanded from small cells into village-wide movements, militias, and eventually larger guerrilla forces. McGehee also emphasized that harsh government repression often strengthened the insurgency, while his intelligence-driven approach had successfully disrupted it.
Colby was at a loss for words and responded only with a subdued remark: “We always seem to be losing.” This left McGehee confused and disappointed. Soon afterward, instead of approving the expansion of the survey program, CIA headquarters reassigned McGehee to a post in Taiwan and ordered the survey program shut down. Although the new assignment offered career advancement, McGehee did not want it and was shocked by the decision.
Efforts by local supporters to reverse the decision failed. The program, which McGehee believed was producing highly valuable intelligence and effectively countering the insurgency, was abruptly terminated. Peer De Silva, then Chief of Station, called him to the office and read cable informing him of Colby’s decision to reassign him to Taiwan. McGehee left Thailand frustrated and unable to understand why a successful initiative had been dismantled.
Only years later did McGehee conclude that his findings may have been unwelcome because they revealed broader truths about Communist movements in Southeast Asia. While his methods appeared to work in Thailand, similar analysis in places like Vietnam might have shown that such insurgencies could not be defeated, an implication that the CIA leadership may have preferred to avoid.
Langley 1967
McGehee unexpectedly returned to CIA headquarters in late 1967. He discovered that the promised assignment in Taiwan had been canceled and realized he had been deliberately misled by his superiors to remove him from Thailand. This deception deepened his growing cynicism about the Agency, and he reluctantly accepted a low-level desk job in China operations.
His new role was bureaucratic, slow, and largely meaningless. Much of the work involved processing trivial information, engaging in repetitive discussions, and drafting speculative plans with little real impact. He endured a culture of inertia, where officers spent long hours in idle conversation, routine paperwork, and drawn-out decision-making processes that rarely lead to action. He and his coworkers found several ways to kill time: “Frequent office bull sessions reminded me of my sophomore days at Notre Dame. Sometimes a few of us would continue the discussions on a coffee break in the cafeteria. This was good for killing about an hour. Lunch entailed a trip to the cafeteria or to nearby McLean, culminating with a long stroll around the Headquarters building that used up at least another hour and a half.” Efforts to recruit Chinese officials were especially futile, with elaborate plans repeatedly proposed, debated, delayed, and ultimately abandoned.
McGehee thought his criticism of the overall lack of success in penetrating Communist China was not as severe as the assessment of Peer De Silva, that intelligence efforts against China produced minimal results despite significant resources: “Much was attempted and much failed,” De Silva wrote. “It was small solace later to learn that this high-expectation, low-yield experience was not mine alone.” McGehee emphasized the repetitive nature of these failures, with new strategies constantly recycling old, unsuccessful ideas. He recounted instances where valuable intelligence suggesting that China’s policies were more moderate or aligned with U.S. interests was ignored or suppressed because it conflicted with entrenched assumptions.
McGehee also highlighted how operational motives, such as career advancement, travel opportunities, and maintaining relevance, encouraged officers to continue portraying China as a major threat. In one example, a desk chief undertook a largely unproductive overseas assignment under the guise of attempting to recruit a Chinese official, illustrating how such operations could become more about personal benefit than meaningful intelligence work: “She went on an extended temporary duty assignment to that resort area, where she spent her time relaxing by the hotel’s pool, dining in its best restaurants, and appearing at other swish spots where the Chinese official might surface and be prompted to speak to her.”
McGehee attempted to share his successful district survey program from Thailand with the Far East Division, now led by William E. Nelson, hoping they could apply its lessons more broadly. Despite submitting a detailed memorandum and later a formal suggestion through the Agency’s suggestion and achievement awards committee, the division rejected his proposals, claiming he lacked jurisdiction over Thailand.
McGehee was stunned when the Chief of the Thai desk informed him that his efforts had caused problems and upset the division’s leadership: “Mr. Nelson wants me to tell you,” an employee explained, “that you have jeopardized all future promotions by your actions.” McGehee realized that the Agency was not genuinely interested in understanding Communist movements in Thailand.
Observing developments in Vietnam, McGehee noted that reporting there ignored the mass-based civilian support for Communist guerrillas, which he suspected mirrored the patterns he had documented in Thailand. Convinced that similar survey operations were needed in Vietnam, he sought a field assignment, despite the personal sacrifices for his family. His survey methods were recognized in one area of the CIA: in the counterinsurgency training at Camp Peary, where the “McGehee method” was taught to students and instructors.
Ultimately, McGehee was cleared for assignment to Vietnam, relieved to leave his unproductive desk role. However, he remained wary that the same institutional resistance and unwillingness to face reality that had frustrated him in Thailand and at Headquarters might persist; he would soon discover that resistance in Vietnam was even greater.
Saigon 1968
Months into his assignment, when McGehee arrived at the U.S. Army officers’ quarters to brief William Colby, he distinctly remembered that “Vietnamese girls in tight leather mini-skirts were being rushed out.” Colby had since been appoint as the Director of CORDS (Civil Operations and Revolutionary Development Support) in Vietnam. In their briefing, Colby focused heavily on body counts and statistical discrepancies, appearing more concerned with numbers than with the broader reality on the ground. When asked for his own assessment, McGehee admitted he lacked sufficient information, having been inundated with meaningless reports.
During a subsequent cocktail reception, McGehee privately seethed at what he saw as Colby’s blindness to the war’s underlying truth. McGehee felt trapped in what he described as an “insane war,” driven by misleading intelligence and bureaucratic ritual. He tried to have a pleasant conversation with Colby: “How is your wife and family?” Colby asked. “Okay,” McGehee responded. “Norma has gone to work. The two boys are in school in Herndon and my two girls are both in college.” You dumb, blind son of a bitch, McGehee thought, do you believe all the garbage in your book of statistics? Don’t you know that the Agency’s intelligence is misleading everyone? Why can’t you recognize this?
Colby continued: “What sort of office setup do you have here? Do you have any good operations with the special police?” McGehee gave a standard answer while in his mind he pondered, We all are running around shouting statistics that disprove the reality. Am I, is he, an inmate in this asylum or a keeper? Or is there any difference? He wondered whether to confront Colby with his views, but he decided against it—if the reports he had provided to Colby in Thailand had not convinced him, then this attempt would be futile. It was a cocktail party they were attending, after all; it would be impolite to argue in this setting. McGehee returned to the CIA compound and made himself a martini. His mind kept racing. Why do we insist on killing people instead of talking to them? How long will this insanity go on? Angry with himself at not confronting Colby with the truth, he threw his drink against the wall, shattering the glass into pieces.
McGehee reached a further breaking point in December 1968 while stationed in Gia Dinh province near Saigon. Alone in a sparsely furnished CIA villa, as helicopter gunships circled overhead and B-52s bombed in the distance, he fell into deep despair over his role in the war. Reflecting on his earlier idealism and commitment to fighting communism, McGehee questioned how that mission had devolved into widespread destruction. He was haunted by images of Vietnamese civilians, especially children, burned by napalm, and felt complicit in what he saw as a “charade of murder and horror.” He was particularly anguished that the CIA, which he had served for 16 years, was, in his view, reporting false or distorted intelligence rather than truth.
He recalled his prior work in Thailand, where he believed he had uncovered a more accurate understanding of communist influence and had proposed a more humane strategy to counter it. The Agency’s rejection of those findings deepened his sense that it preferred policies that led to continued killing rather than meaningful reform. Overwhelmed, McGehee turned his thoughts to the loaded pistol in his nightstand.
